What actually goes in a page title, and why yours is probably wrong

A page title should say one specific thing the page is about, in the words your customers use, with your business name last. About 50–60 characters survives without being cut off. The description beneath it is your advert, not a summary — roughly 140–160 characters, written to earn the click.

This is the least glamorous work in search and it is still where most sites lose. Not because it's difficult. Because it's boring, so it gets skipped, and a template fills it in.

What happens if I don't write them?

Search engines write them for you, from whatever text was near the top of the page. That's how you end up with results titled "Home | Acme" and a description that starts mid-sentence with your cookie notice. You had a free advert on the results page and let a machine fill it in.

Why do my own pages compete with each other?

Because more than one of them is about the same thing. If your Home, Services and About pages all try to rank for emergency plumber West Covina, you have three weak pages rather than one strong one — and the search engine has to guess which you meant. It often guesses wrong, and the page it picks is rarely the one you'd have chosen.

The fix is unglamorous: one subject per page, stated in the first sentence, with the other pages linking to it rather than competing.

What makes a heading structure "correct"?

One main heading per page that says what the page is for, then sub-headings in order without skipping levels — the way a document is structured, not the way a designer picked font sizes.

The part worth doing properly: phrase those sub-headings as the questions people actually ask. "Pricing" is a label. "How much does an emergency callout cost at night?" is a question someone typed, and it's the one that gets quoted back to them.

You already own the best source for those questions — your inbox. The things customers ask you before they buy are, almost word for word, the things they type into a search box.

What else is in this job?

• Real filenames and descriptions on images. A screen reader reads the description aloud; it's also how images get found. Stuffing it with keywords is a penalty, not a boost.
• Readable addresses. /emergency-plumbing, not /page?id=47.
• Links between your own pages with wording that says where they go. "Click here" tells a search engine nothing.
• Zero broken links at launch — and checked again afterwards, because other people change their addresses without telling you.
• An honest "last updated" date. Fake freshness is detectable and it costs trust.

Common questions

How long should a service page be?

Long enough to actually answer the question, which in practice tends to land between 800 and 1,500 words. Length isn't the goal — nothing thin enough to be filler, nothing padded to hit a number.

Do keywords still matter?

The words your customers use matter. Repeating a phrase to hit a density target hasn't worked for a decade and reads badly to the humans you're trying to convince.

Will fixing titles alone move my rankings?

Sometimes noticeably, if they were genuinely bad or duplicated. More often it's a precondition rather than a cause. It's the cheapest work on the list, which is why it should already be done before anyone sells you anything more expensive.